Need to find a good home for my Wurlitzer series 31, I have opportunity for a 4460.

[paulj0557]

Here is a great organ. An organ that a few months ago I was confused in thinking it was a tube oscillator Wurlitzer because of the two speaker grills on the cabinet. The 44 prefix should have alerted me, but I tend to get my 4100 and 4400 series models mixed up, especially when they look so similar. Well now I have an opportunity to grab a beautiful 4460- a full console Wurlitzer ES reed, a free-reed no less.

Having a 4410 spinet I am very much impressed by it's huge headroom and I'm impressed by it's smooth flute tone coming from reeds. So why would I want a 4460 console if I already have a Series 31 ES reed from 46' and the 4410? Because it's the last ES reed made, looks great, plays perfect, and it's $75!

Ahhhh!!!!! I'm supposed to be reforming organ acquiring fool LOL! So my 4410 came along to phase out my series 31. I wanted the attack of the free reeds. I still have my Series 31 here in Columbus, no bench- I'm keeping the 310 tone cabinet that came with it, but come get the organ if you can convince me you are very serious about restoring it ( It does play every tab and every reed, but does need some new capacitors- remember the series 31 has no internal speaker- it is the speakerless version of the series 30. The 31 does have a MAIN tab and a VIBRATO tab to operate the upper rotor on the 310. The Bench would not be too difficult for a cabinet maker to duplicate. Ironically Lowe's has legs that look identical to the organ legs and so it might be a weekend project making a good duplicated bench. I do also have the pedal board. Maybe if I find my 31 a good home I can go get the 4460.

If you want my series 31 please send me a personal message. I am in Columbus Ohio. The sooner the better, but I cannot deliver and you must come with your own truck. It is in a storage unit so it is a drive up and pick up situation. It is extremely heavy.

I will NOT include the 310 tone cabinet, even for cash. I love my 310 tone cabinet's tube amps and was Don Leslie's first marketed design, designed for Wurlitzer as early as 1941 ( WWII made dating tricky) for the 1946 series 31 organ. Being that the rotor is a bit inferior to Don's single direction- speaking drum since it speaks out of both sides with larger openings. I'm going to put a piece of foam on one side of the rotor to see if it sounds better. The 2- 6L6 amps X 2 in the 310 cabinet rock! If you are a newbie and you want to make your organ sound better the first great thing you can do is get a tube amplifier with a ratry cabinet like a Leslie or the Wurlitzer Spectratone. Unfortunately most (if not all) of the Spectratone powered tone cabinets are solid state...correct me if I'm wrong.

I have plenty of organs and I won't lose sleep over not getting the 4460 because my 4410 is a premium organ, but I look at the image and it makes me twitchy LOL. Wurlitzer 4460 3-11-12.jpg

[andyg]

Paul, if you block one of the openings, won't you get half speed tremolo? That's the way his later double Rotosonics worked, with two speakers and half speed rotation, for a shallower tremolo.

[paulj0557]

Paul, if you block one of the openings, won't you get half speed tremolo? That's the way his later double Rotosonics worked, with two speakers and half speed rotation, for a shallower tremolo.

Andy, this is interesting that Don made a two opposing speaker rotosonic Leslie. How much later was this? The 1981 Elegante has just one 6X9, but maybe they just preferred it for that particular application I suppose. The Wurlitzer 310's upper metal rotor is very frequency specific in terms of it's effectiveness. I'm impressed that it has any effect at all, but it actually has some pitch shifting going on if you can believe it. I should seal that gap between the metal rotor and the plywood shelf the speakers mounted to before I do anything, since a lot of sound escapes all around the speaker. It's odd that Don didn't have the rotor spin closer to the plywood to begin with.

I'll keep you posted. Oh', I did it again! I some how convinced myself that the 4460 was an ES reed organ when if fact it's not. I knew this, but when I was talking with the woman who listed it with no name she sent me an image of what I knew was a 4460. Well, there is another two speaker grill model of Wurlitzer from the early 60's that went up for sale two weeks ago that IS a Wurli ES reed. In my excitement I somehow thought that is was the same organ...except that other organ was a spinet. I sure would like to have a chronological set of images of all of the Wurlitzer models. The Organ Form images and the new Electronic Organ History group has lots of images too. Ironically the images of the 4460 on the EOH site are the ones I uploaded to the the site to begin with.